President Barack Obama delivers the nation's annual State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress and the Supreme Court on Jan. 25, 2011.

If you want to understand the state of the union, all you had to do was listen to the speech. Barack Obama challenged America to remember its greatness and to not get discouraged. He talked about winning the future. This was the anti-malaise speech, meaning you’ll never catch Obama in a Jimmy Carter cardigan.

The key line in the speech was about health care when Obama said, hey, the bill has been passed into law, let’s make it better where we can (if you insist) and then move on. He was saying that we’ve had tough times, that he’s had to make some tough decisions — not all of them apparently popular — but that turning back isn’t the answer.

That’s what he wanted everyone to remember from the speech. He said it reasonably well — he didn’t soar, as in Tucson — and my guess is that the polls will show that people liked the speech, just as the polls are showing that people suddenly like Obama again. Obama wanted to do a Reagan-like optimism-in-America speech, and that’s exactly what he did.

Among my other sins, I'm a serial columnist. Over too many years to mention, I've written news columns, sports columns, features columns and op-ed columns. My first job was covering the Virginia Squires and Dr. J in the old American Basketball Association. I moved from the Virginian-Pilot to the Los Angeles Times, then to the Baltimore Sun, then to the late Rocky Mountain News and on to The Post.

A blog about whatever thoughts bounce through Mike Littwin's head — from politics to basketball (speaking of bouncing) to politics to books to politics to movies to politics to Sarah Palin (whenever I need the extra clicks).